The recent uptick in readership for this long-running, but decidedly episodic blog prompted me to go back and review some of the 'gems' and other blatherings that are included.
One that particularly caught my eye today was the May 23, 2013 blog about "Hijacking the Summit."
The meaningful paragraph went something like this: "But at the conference, to which several hundred people had been flown in for several days, we (a newly-met Intel colleague from Israel, Nathan Zeldes, and me, from Park City, Utah) were disbarred from having a session, or even a speaking gig. Protocol meant that 'the important people' had agenda time; the troops were to listen and salute. We poked this beast several times and got nowhere."
How many of you have shared some experience like this? We were incensed, and the story goes on to say that we found a way around it at the time, and it resulted in some interesting, if not fully lucrative, collaboration inventions and breakthroughs for its time.
Of late, I have been concerned once again about improving the Collaboration Experience for companies, partially because we (in our new company, AstroVirtual Inc. https://www.astrovirtual.com/) have created some very much improved capability tor teams to work together (including using some of those ideas we first had for the Intel IT conference where they didn't want to hear them).
One of the key technologies we've augmented is Collaborative War-rooms, rooms with multiple displays of pertinent corporate data and videos of key folk, etc. And WOW, what we get in feedback is almost astonishing.
We had a senior VP for a major corporation (a good friend of a great friend, who had a VERY responsible position for years at his company) tell us that our "solution" would probably scare most C-level managers, and certainy most CEO's he knows. His point: "No high-level manager wants to be 2nd-guessed by his team, so he/she will never allow them to see all the data you guys propose to share widely amongst all the team members."
Another key commentator, again a long-term C-level executive for one of the top ten high-tech companies of the past thirty years, said: "You are proposing to allow junior members of the team to see a lot of data that they usually don't see, and in particular, when the leader is talking, he/she will want them to pay attention to him/her rather than prowl around in the data on their own. How do you control them, and how do you get them to listen to 'the boss'?"
Meanwhile, we are collecting user perspectives about War-rooms and their value, and I was struck by this advice from a key team at BMC Software (which I always found to be a respected 2nd-tier software vendor in the database / repository space): Engage a variety of perspectives. Even if you're working on an IT problem, you may be surprised ate the unique perspectives that some seemingly distant employees--sales, finance, marketing--may bring to the problem (This also breaks down silos common to most companies). (https://www.bmc.com/blogs/it-war-room/
Let me give a concrete example. I, with my corporate engineering team, and several IT folk built a worldwide satellite-based communication network for HP in the mid-eighties--7 uplinks and 300 downlinks. We built it so that the engineering teams at 91 disparate labs in 26 states and nations could communicate more fully (visually as well as written and aural). Any HP engineer anywhere in the world could get to a downlink within two hours by car or plane; uplinks were judiciously placed so that every major lab had access. And Tony Fanning and a couple of others did sociology studies for who adopted this novel capability (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/637069.637109). Yes, a number of engineers did indeed use it, and offer numerous suggestions for improvement. But the surprise--this is circa 1985--was that the accounting teams and the quality assurance teams were the real users. Corporate Engineering was not in the business of producing products for HP--our goal was Engineering Effectiveness within the corporation, not sales outside.
Later, as Intel tried to sell dedicated collaboration tools, notably ProShare and Team Station, I joined Intel via the Dialogic acquisition. And in fact the "Hijacking" referenced above was done to pursue better tools for collaboration. My first comeuppance was a 1999 interview to meet with Pat Gelsinger, the program manager for these products. I explained why their shortcomings were disastrous; he promptly ended the interview and sent me to Intel IT instead of Intel Labs. Ironically, four years later, Intel set up the Intel Collaboratory, and I was selected as its first director. We built an experimental program termed Miramar, got a set of patent claims awarded, which later became a significant portion of the underlying technology we now have incorporated into AstroVirtual's tools (and have gotten another 35 patent claims allowed to date).
If the story ended there, it would be a fun anecdote, but it doesn't. HP had come out with HP Halo, and Cisco had answered with Cisco Telepresence during this interval while I directed the Intel Collaboratory. Naturally, we did studies on their systems, and in fact became a quasi-partner for each. It was almost laughable. Carly Fiorina had commissioned Halo because HP was supporting Disney, who wanted much better collaboration between their California design labs and the nascent Disneyworld team in Tokyo. Halo was an elegant solution, with camera pairings done correctly (by contrast with Cisco's), and high-definition video and audio. But it was expensive, and HP sales teams largely ignored it.
Cisco built their equally expensive system so that JohnChambers, a noted dyslexic, could have 'face-to-face' meetings with CEOs and political potentates around the globe without having to go there. He basically banned the use of side monitors able to display PowerPoint slides or their equivalent, because he wanted the emphasis to be on 'the people experience' (and because he had trouble reading slides, but that went unsaid). He also commanded that the camera set-up focus on the experience for the single person at the head of the table rather than the several ancillary attendees in the room. They were all "in on the meeting" but they were distorted and off-center if they tried to 'take the stage' whereas HP's system allowed, nay even encouraged, the perspective for all attendees to 'feel equally included.'
Cisco's system got built in much larger quantities--300 systems within the company reputedly, and nearly 1,000 at other companies--despite the extraordinary costs (ostensibly $300,000 per site for the IT network and cameras, never mine the room dedication, with an annual operating cost of at least one-third of that).
I used both systems extensively, courtesy of HP and Cisco, and we did several in-depth proprietary evaluations, as you might imagine. I even lobbied at one point for Intel to buy and install a dozen Cisco Telepresence sites, despite the obvious cost and usage issues. Intel declined the idea. HP didn't want to bid Halo for Intel, and I was never sure why, but those talks never progressed.
I could also insert here some stories along the way, but they basically will bog down the basic point that I am about to make. Suffice to say that the reason I was equipped to challenge Gelsinger was that I'd done extensive work at Dialogic on collaboration tools and their usage. including the first installation of Webex in the world.
Gelsinger, by the way, is one of the most tech-savvy CEO's {he was then CTO}, never mind that the Intel Board tossed him out as CEO last autumn and brought in the current bozo, who doubtless won't last long. But for collaboration, he had not studied the usage models, just the technical achievements.
Here is the point. I built the first system at HP for the engineers to work collaboratively, at our far-flung disparate divisions, a business architecture shared by few companies then or now. Intel also built its system for engineers, viewing the opportunity to be individual sales to designers rather than to a company to overcome a strategic design issue. HP built their Halo system for one specific group of designers, who (when finished) didn't need it much anymore, and there were no equivalent high-profile clients like Disney.
Cisco built their system for their CEO to romance Queen Elizabeth and other dignitaries as much as to build a network-centric business. Chambers himself thought in 2008 that it would be a $1 Billion business for Cisco by 2009. (see https://www.nojitter.com/customer-experience/chambers-and-telepresence).
But here's the rub:"The wrong people are using the system." I was told this at Cisco multiple times, and at HP several times. The intent was to save executive travel time, and allow executives to be 'more places with 'presence' more often, more effectively. But the rooms were 90% booked by non-executives, so much so that executives, when they did want to use them, found them "full of the wrong people."
And that led Cisco to buy Webex, for the rest of us. Whereupon Cisco modified Webex to fit it into the corporate network rendering it harder to use by simpletons but easier to use with Cisco equipment to collect archival materials, to embed the Webex experience with other Cisco products and so forth.
And Eric Yuan, who was CTO at Webex at acquisition, labored for a bit, chafing at Cisco's help, and then launched Zoom in 2011, with financial support from Dan Scheinman, Cisco's chief legal officer (who resigned to back Yuan. Dan sent his cousin Jim Scheinman to Yuan. Jim named the company Zoom, and brought the first 'real money' to the table.
I started using Zoom in 2013, and found it to be phenomenal, focused on 'the wrong people' as much as the preferred purchasers. I was a heavy user for major high-tech interviews long before the COVID pandemic 'launched the company. Zoom went from 10 million use-cases per month in January 2020 to 300 million per month in March that year. Voilà!!! ZOOM, as in Collaboration tools nowis a NOUN, not just a VERB.
What we'd found at Intel circa 2005 still fit. "The wrong people" told us, for example, that executives had no trouble getting travel expense money, and that they LOVED the trips, never mind what they said. They were not about to give up traveling and its perks to sit in front of a computer screen. But these folk, in supporting departments, never got travel money, or if they begged for it, had to demonstrate huge value and need for them to travel. With Cisco Telepresence, they could meet with colleagues anywhere, and in fact, GET THINGS DONE. What a concept! But, they also noted, that the Cisco sites were optimized for 'big meetings' and not the day-to-day meetings that most of them craved. And they found fault with a hundred details about the system, but there was nowhere for their imput to be gathered. Sigh.
Food for thought?
